There’s been quite a buzz around lookalikes–no, not the celebrity doppelgangers used by a high-end designer in a recent fashion show, although exploring that would be fun–but lookalike audiences in the context of marketing.
They’re called that because they are
A lookalike audience is a group of people who share similar characteristics–think demographics, interests, behaviors, and the like–to your existing customers. The concept here is pretty straightforward: if these people resemble your best customers, they’re more likely to convert.
They look like those consumers who are absolutely crazy for your brand. You know, the ones who not only buy your products but tell their friends and just about anyone who’ll listen to them all about you.
Obviously, the trick is to find those lookalikes and then turn them into buyalikes.
To create a lookalike audience, you first need a “seed” audience, a list of your top customers. This data is poured through machine learning algorithms to find other users who exhibit similar behaviors and characteristics. The term “seed” is used by design. It’s like planting a garden: the better the seed, the better the harvest.
How to find the best lookalikes
However, if you limit this seed file to your first-party data, there’s a good chance you won’t capture as many–let alone the best–lookalikes as you’d like.
PebblePost’s Lookalike Audiences start where others stop to identify people who look and act like your best customer. Our unique approach doesn’t rely on third-party data. Instead, we connect your first-party data to billions of online and offline browsing and buying behaviors. We know what your best customers buy, what they’re interested in, and what they shop for across hundreds of brands. As a result, our AI-driven machine learning models identify and engage high lifetime value prospects who share the attributes of your most valued customers and are in the consideration stage. Not only do they look like your valued customers, they act like them.
That’s why you should partner with PebblePost, the creator and leader of Programmatic Direct Mail (PDM) if you want to elevate your brand’s overall marketing performance using a lookalike strategy. PebblePost PDM brings a uniquely powerful offline component to your omnichannel marketing.
In its privacy-by-design framework, PebblePost connects billions of first-party identity, intent, and transaction signals across 500+ brands and 98% of U.S. households to identify, model, and optimize a decision-ready lookalike audience. Leveraging this shared first-party data–which includes a portion of your first-party data–produces a lookalike audience that maps more precisely with the profile of your most adored customers.
Here’s how it works.
- You share a seed data file that PebblePost then maps to a household in the PebblePost Graph, the data asset that connects those billions of signals. The Graph develops multiple AI-driven machine-learning models to determine the attributes and behaviors most predictive of your brand’s performance.
- Households are ranked and scored with the highest propensity to perform based on your goals and budget. PebblePost filters households against business rules, including Do-Not Mail, current customers, and geolocation.
- PebblePost creates a control group for performance lift measurement, while all other eligible households are mailed within 12-24 hours.
- PebblePost automatically matches transactions back to exposed audiences at the individual level. Transaction and conversion data is fed back into the machine learning models to optimize your audience continuously.
A lookalike audience cooked to perfection
Does the PebblePost approach to creating and engaging a lookalike audience work? Well, BBQGuys, a 20+-year-old brand that’s the most trusted resource for grilling and outdoor living, partnered with PebblePost to find new customers who are as enthusiastic as their best.
Privacy changes made it harder for this e-commerce brand to reach and engage target audiences across the web. BBQGuys needed to explore other marketing channels but faced challenges measuring impact on revenue through top-of-funnel strategies like traditional direct mail.
With PebblePost, BBQGuys connected its first-party data to billions of signals captured in the PebblePost Graph to model lookalike audiences.
The PebblePost Platform engaged the identified decision-ready lookalike audiences with high-impact mail to drive awareness.
The result has been as tasty as something straight from a grill, cooked to perfection. PebblePost has become a top revenue driver for BBQGuys, consistently outperforming the brand’s acquisition benchmark.
Not so incidentally, this approach yielded a return on advertising spend (ROAS) of more than 10x.
Four points of distinction of PebblePost Lookalikes
As a way to find prospects with a high likelihood of becoming high-value customers, the PebblePost Always-on Lookalike product offers four factors that distinguish it from other new customer acquisition approaches
- Channel Diversification
PebblePost lets you avoid digital fatigue and find high-value, decision-ready prospects in the environment where they’re more likely to make purchase decisions.
- Always-on Algorithmic Targeting
PebblePost AI-driven machine learning models identify high lifetime value prospects at the purchase consideration stage.
- High Quality, Shared First-party Data
PebblePost’s brand of shared first-party data is updated daily and used for higher precision modeling, avoiding the inaccuracies associated with third-party data.
- Super performance + Incrementality
PebblePost lets you optimize for incrementality to show the impact of your acquisition programs.
Talk with a PebblePost solutions specialist to learn how our Always-on Lookalike product can help you find new customers or solve other customer acquisition or retention issues.
